No More Dying Then: Part One

A five-year-old boy named John Lawrence disappears, and the case lands on Wexford at the worst possible moment. Seven and a half months later, when the trail has gone properly cold, mad taunting letters start arriving, and then another child, Stella Rivers, vanishes. The pattern is familiar in the way that makes a detective's stomach turn: years earlier, a little girl disappeared in similar circumstances and was never found. Wexford is afraid he is watching the same story play out again, and that he will fail at it the same way.

The pressure comes from every direction. The media badger him, his superiors push, and an anonymous caller claims to have taken little John. Wexford responds the way he always does under siege, by getting grumpier and more stubborn, and the episode is largely the sight of a good man refusing to let a case beat him twice. Meanwhile Burden is quietly dealing with a loss in his own family, which puts a grief-stricken edge on everything he does. Burden's private grief, mentioned but not yet explored, gives the hour a second thread the later parts will pull.

George Baker and Christopher Ravenscroft carry the weight between them, with Celia Gregory as Gemma Lawrence, the missing boy's mother, Simon Shepherd as Ivor Fairfax Swan, Marion Bailey as Ros Swan and Dave Hill as Dep Chief Constable Freeborn looking on. Louie Ramsay's Dora, Ken Kitson's D.S. Martin, Marian McLoughlin's Grace and a young Noah Huntley as John Burden fill out the world. Geoffrey Case wrote it, and Jan Sargeant directed. The hour opened the third series in October 1989, and the script wastes no time putting its two missing children in front of the viewer.

The episode opens a story that is really about the gap between a detective's oldest failure and his newest case. Wexford has one unsolved disappearance lodged in his memory and one live one in front of him, and the letters arriving in the post office suggest somebody knows exactly how much that hurts. It is an uncomfortable, effective start.